


Choke Chain

by dramatispersonae



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Body Horror, Canon-Typical Mind Control, Canon-Typical Morality, Canon-Typical Questionable Consent and Free Will, Canon-Typical Violence, D/s themes, Dubiously Consensual Friendships, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, It/Its Pronouns for The Distortion (The Magnus Archives), Other, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:34:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24032872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dramatispersonae/pseuds/dramatispersonae
Summary: Things Gertrude Robinson possesses: decades of experience killing, containing, and otherwise thwarting supernatural beings, an uncompromising drive to destroy the Rituals and the people who would see them completed, Gerry's loyalty. Things Gertrude Robinson apparently also possesses: a monster on a magic leash.
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Michael, Gerard Keay/The Distortion
Comments: 85
Kudos: 400
Collections: Gerrymichael Big Bang 2020





	Choke Chain

**Author's Note:**

> GUESS who spent weeks hyped to post fic for the Gerrymichael Big Bang and then almost entirely forgot to post it on the correct day. guess
> 
> anyway. in this fic we have:  
> getrude keeping the distortion on a leash  
> the distortion coping with being bound to a physical form significantly worse than it did in canon, partially on account of that leash  
> gerry coping with the death of his mother and working for gertrude… about as well as he did in canon, which is to say, VERY poorly, just with some different options this time
> 
> warnings include ?misgendering?, some of it intentional, some of it not, deeply under-discussed relationship dynamics, and what it says in the tags. content includes a shitty eldritch dinner date and gerry attempting to be a monster veterinarian. i think we can all be reasonable people here, but nonetheless i feel the need to say that the views expressed in the fic are the views of the characters expressing them (possibly. if they're not lying.) and do not necessarily reflect my own
> 
> much gratitude to [aromantic-eight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rbmifan/pseuds/aromantic-eight) for beta reading
> 
> this fic has a GORGEOUS accompanying work of art by magickkart which you can see [here](https://magickkart.tumblr.com/post/617334949692964864/the-piece-i-drew-for-the-gerrymichael-bigbang-i)
> 
> EDIT as of May 9th: and it now has a second AMAZING piece of fanart by [divinesick/solipsistful](https://archiveofourown.org/users/solipsistful/pseuds/divinesick), which you can see [here](https://spiralise.tumblr.com/post/617685925255839744/id-a-cartoon-of-gerry-and-michael-from-the)

Working 'with' Gertrude is not really that at all. They're not partners, and certainly not equals. When she shares information, it's clearly against her better nature, a regrettably necessary task that she carries out with perfunctory duty and no little distaste. She definitely prefers to achieve goals through the strategic manipulation of ignorance, and she's definitely still adjusting to the amount of information that Gerry comes pre-equipped with. He gets it, sort of. Half the point of Watching is knowing more, and more, and more, and _sharing_ that knowledge doesn't really come with the territory. She's remarkably resistant to the Eye in a lot of ways, considering how long she's been Archivist, but this is one impulse she's either given up resisting or never resisted in the first place.

So it's not really working with her. Working for her, more like. Gerry's okay with that. Knowledge like his, upbringing like his, screwy morals and capacity for violence like his, he's a loaded gun and he knows it. Gertrude, at least, he trusts to aim him in a way that's for the overall benefit of humanity.

Not his benefit. He knows that too. It's a numbers game, for Gertrude, and the importance of individuals is that 'one' is the least amount of people to sacrifice.

However, for as long as she considers him an ally, he has use of whatever information and resources she decides he needs. She parts with her explosives easier than she parts with her knowledge, and sometimes all you really need to know is how to strategically apply dynamite. Sometimes she'll give him information gleaned from statements. Very rarely he'll meet with some of her contacts.

She's _never_ given him a monster on a leash before.

"Uh," Gerry says, looking at the thing that all attempts at reason slide off of like water on a greased duck. "What." It definitely hadn't been there when he came in and sat at the table with Gertrude. Unless it had been? No, definitely not, he would have noticed, except if this thing didn't want Gerry to notice he's pretty sure he wouldn't have. No one else in the coffee shop seems to be able to notice it, a conclusion Gerry came to based on the lack of horrified screams.

"A safety measure," Gertrude says. "I want to make absolutely certain the Eye can't perceive you."

"That's _safety_?" Gerry says. The only reason he's still seated is that Gertrude is, and he's already used to taking his cues from her. If she doesn't feel threatened enough to stand, he won't either. Not that standing would do much. The monster has… height? It's tall. He can't tell how tall, because it seems to stretch when it's in his peripheral vision, and it looks different in reference to all nearby things that he could use to estimate its actual size. It has hair. It has eyes, vibrant but with no distinguishable color. It has hands, and those Gerry can perceive far more of than he wants to, swollen and jagged and long, too long and too sharp and held so still he keeps seeing them move. Really, the glinting spider silk hooked into its wrists and emerging from beneath its scarf like a leash is the least weird thing happening here, except that Gertrude is holding the other ends of them.

"For a certain value of safe, yes," Gertrude says. "It's bound quite thoroughly."

The monster is wearing a surgical mask. Gerry has no idea why. Aesthetics? It's not a creature of the Corruption, he can tell that much, and the spider silk doesn't seem to be a natural part of it, so it's likely not Web either. Web is probably where the binding comes from. Hands like that, he'd almost say Flesh, but that's not right. It's not just wrong in a meaty way. There's a definite mental component to it. He thinks he should be able to tell what it is, but in addition to the way it slides away from his thoughts, impossible to get purchase on, it feels _muted_ somehow. Compacted. Pressed in and smoothed over.

"How does it work?" Gerry asks. 'It' covers a lot of things: the monster, protection from the Eye, the binding. Whatever the hell Gertrude's thought process is here. Hopefully he'll get an answer about at least one of those.

Gertrude twitches her fingers, and the monster bends down. The motion is smooth, elegant, and clearly involuntary. "You'll obey Gerard's commands until he returns to me at the end of this assignment, unless they contradict any standing orders. For the duration of your time with him, shield him and those around him from the Eye's vision the way you do when you are with me. You are not to harm him unless the alternative is his death. You are not to leave him unless he orders you to do so."

Gerry finds himself holding a new thread of spider silk, one that curves up and disappears under the monster's scarf. It's looking at him with baleful, calculating eyes, madness and animosity so clear he can almost taste the bitter, coppery salt of them.

"Give him clear orders. So long as you are absolutely sure of what you want, he will follow your will, but if you phrase something exceptionally poorly he will likely take advantage."

That's arguably the most relevant information he could get, and he should be grateful to have it. He is. It's just that this is a _lot_ , and there's a very big question being left unanswered. "Am I going to get an explanation for why this is something you have?" Gerry asks, gesturing at the monster as if there was any way it could be unclear what he's referring to.

"Perhaps," Gertrude says. "For now, you have your instructions."

She moves her chair back from the table and stands. She doesn't look at the monster as she gathers her things, but it's not that she's avoiding looking at him. He's just utterly beneath her notice as she pulls up the hood of her raincoat and leaves the coffee shop.

And then Gerry's alone with whatever this thing is. He wonders what's under the mask, and if he actually wants to know the answer to that. Probably not. But he does still want to know more about what this thing _is_ , what he can do, why the hell Gertrude gave him to Gerry. There's only one potential source of information left. "Can you talk?" he asks the monster.

He feels the smile more than he sees it. He can't see the lower half of the monster's face at all beneath the surgical mask, and the nearly-human way the monster's eyes crinkle is nothing to the feeling of vicious mirth and anticipatory hunger that stabs at Gerry like a harpoon. The monster says nothing.

Gerry realizes that a question is not an order, and no one has said the monster has to answer his questions. The words to demand a response are halfway to his mouth when he changes his mind.

No. He'll use this thing as a safeguard against the Eye, accept the value a monster has as a bodyguard, but Gerry's not going to force him to do anything he doesn't need. "Okay," Gerry says. "Do you know where we're going?" Was the monster there the whole time, listening? Would he have paid attention to the conversation if he was?

The monster still says nothing, but he kind of… ripples, like a silk scarf in a breeze.

"We're going to go pick something up for Gertrude. Probably nothing we want to know too much about, nothing we want to be touching. You know a guy called Salesa?" Gerry feels the weight of the monster's attention, and the anticipation has a distinctly confused edge to it. "He's like eBay for awful magic shit. If it's something she's taking this many precautions to keep the Eye from knowing about, it's not going to be great."

The monster tilts his head. He seems to have an actual height, now, one that stays largely the same no matter what Gerry's comparing to him. He's easier to look at in general. There's still not a lot Gerry can actually say for sure about _how_ the monster looks, but at least looking at him doesn't feel like staring at television static for an hour. The confused feeling intensifies.

"Are you trying to ask me something?" Gerry asks the monster. The monster nods. "So you can't talk?"

The monster shrugs, points to Gerry, and then taps a finger against his mask. He repeats the last two motions a few times when Gerry fails to get the message. Gerry isn't even thinking about trying to decipher it at first, too distracted by wondering when the monster's hands began to look like normal human hands. He could almost forget how they looked before, if it weren't that the way they looked before was horrible and he will not be forgetting it at all. Then he starts actually trying to figure out what the monster is attempting to communicate. "Do you need me to take the mask off?"

The monster shrugs again. This time he points to Gerry, taps the fingers of one hand against the thumb in a 'talking' motion, and then points to himself.

Gerry catches himself absently spinning the thread of spider silk between his fingers. Ah.

"Do you need me to order you to talk?"

The monster nods.

Cool. Figured that part out. Now he just needs to figure out if that's something he should actually do. There has to be a reason the monster isn't allowed to speak. Is it a good reason?

Well, if it's a good reason, then either the order will be solid and Gerry won't be able to reverse it, or he'll figure out the reason soon enough. Right now, making the monster speech-capable sounds potentially useful. If the thing immediately starts screaming fit to make his ears bleed or tells incessant knock-knock jokes, Gerry can tell him to be quiet again. "You can talk," he says.

The monster gives him a distinctly unimpressed look.

"I order you to talk," Gerry says, then adds hastily, "if you want to," so he doesn't force a never ending stream of words from the monster or something equally absurd.

"What authority," the monster says drily. His voice is light. Faintly nasal, with a singsong undertone and inaudible echoes crawling around the edges of each word. It's a human voice, aside from all the ways it's not. "If you're going to be squeamish, you might as well pick out a headstone now and save your next of kin the trouble."

"I don't have any next of kin," says Gerry, which is an _unbelievably_ stupid response.

The monster hums contemplatively. "You wouldn't," he says. "It's much easier with the ones no one will miss."

"I bet," Gerry says, refusing to rise to the bait. Whatever that's bait for. "So. Salesa. Thoughts?"

"He likely has them. Most people do, at least once or twice."

Gerry bites back a groan. Is this just an elaborate punishment for his own smart mouth? He tries not to talk to Gertrude that way, since she's so serious. Or maybe it's not her. Maybe this is just cosmic punishment. "Helpful. Thanks."

"If you want me to be _helpful_ , that's a different order."

Gerry spins the thread again, then says, "No."

"No?"

"No. Not doing that." There is no way in hell holding on to this weird little Web trap isn't going to fuck with him too, push him further than he wants to go and fool him that it's his choice. So Gerry's going to err on the side of not giving orders. If Gertrude thought that he would be in immediate, serious danger from her monster then she wouldn't have given him to Gerry, unless she wanted Gerry dead, in which case she'd do it herself to make sure it got done properly. She doesn't like to delegate. He's going to assume that he doesn't need to spend all his time ordering the monster around just to keep it from attacking him, and save his orders for situations where he's absolutely sure no standing orders will cover what he needs done and there's no other way to do it.

"Soft," the monster mutters.

"Like I really care about your opinion," Gerry says. He puts on his coat. Gertrude prefers to avoid meeting him at the Archives, rarely meets him at Pinhole Books. She likes generic, anonymous locations, the kind that see a constant stream of people go in and out, where the conversations of other people overlap to the point that even if she didn't have a dozen ways of redirecting attention away from herself no one would really be able to hear what she was saying in her affected, quavering old-lady voice. He has no complaints about this. The coffee shop's warm. The weather's awful. He wore a rain jacket over his coat and hung it over the back of his chair to dry, and it's still very damp. "Do you have a name?" he asks, lifting one of the sleeves and shaking it lightly.

"Gertrude calls me Michael," the monster says, and something about the way he says it makes Gerry feel like he's checking for a reaction, some kind of response or recognition. Gerry doesn't have one to offer. The only Michaels Gerry's heard about from Gertrude are the handful who have given useful statements. Salesa's a Michael, sort of, but Gerry doubts there's a connection there.

"Do you want to be called Michael?" Gerry asks.

The monster blinks. His eyelashes are thick enough to be visible despite being relatively pale. "No," he says.

"What do you want to be called?"

The thing that is not Michael giggles. It's a skittering sound that makes Gerry feel like his brain is being pet the wrong way. "What. Yes. I am a what."

Ah. Fantastic. Something that wants to play word games, or something so far from human he doesn't prioritize the same words. Although, on that subject… "Do you want to be called 'he'?"

The thing that is not Michael blinks again. "Are you trying to be _nice_ to me?"

"No," Gerry says. He is stalling, a bit, keeping an eye on the rain outside and waiting for a lull. If he times it right, maybe he can run to an Underground station and get shelter before becoming thoroughly saturated. "Just establishing terms."

"Ah. Terms. Contracts and agreements," says the thing that is not Michael. "I am not, except that I am, because I've been made to be. Made to be Michael, except Michael is gone, and now I am here. Michael was a 'he.' I am an 'it.'"

Well, Gerry's got a pronoun, at least. And a headache. Whatever, net gain, Gerry has a headache more often than not. "Do you have anything you want to be called, aside from Michael?"

"I don't want to be _called_ at all," it says. "But that's what I'm for, now. I'm Gertrude's dog." It giggles again, high and hysterical. "I exist because she wanted me to. Hers to call, now, whatever she'd like."

Yeah, Gerry doesn't have time to unpack all of that. He's almost definitely going to have to deal with it at some point, because he's never come across a complicated tangle of otherworldly bullshit and not gotten sucked in somehow, but he's not dealing with it right now. Right now, the rain has gone from a constant rattling downpour to a lighter spit, and he's going to haul ass. "If I need to get your attention, like right now, because we're leaving," Gerry says, pulling on his rain jacket, "what can I say so you know I'm talking to you?"

"You can tell me to heel," the monster says, and laughs.

"Give me _something_ to call you," Gerry says, and doesn't realize that's an order until he feels the anger radiating off the monster.

"You can call me _Michael_ ," it says, bitter and vicious. " _She_ wouldn't like you to call me anything else."

"Fine," Gerry says. "We're leaving. _Michael_." He doesn't mean to jerk the thread in his hand, but he does, and it causes Michael to stumble. Gerry lets the thread go slack as soon as he realizes what he's done. There is a part of him that takes a momentary pleasure in literally off-balancing one of the horrors that's defined his life, and a part of him that's disgusted by that part, and a third part of him that doesn't give a shit and just wants to get a move on before the rain comes back in full force. He almost wants to apologize, but he doesn't. He just leaves the coffee shop with Michael trailing behind him like the world's worst balloon.

The rain picks up halfway to the station, and Gerry scrunches his face as he's assaulted by frigid, stinging droplets. No wonder so many people who serve alien forces of misery hang out in London. The weather is atrocious. He's so focused on getting to the station that he doesn't ever stop to look back at Michael.

A mistake, though for what reason Gerry can't decide. The obvious, sensical reason he should regret not looking back is that Michael is a monster, and it's stupid to prioritize getting to the Tube over making sure the horrible knife-handed creature isn't creeping up behind him with knife-hands at the ready. Yes, Gertrude told it not to harm him, but he's not the kind of person who _trusts_. He's definitely not putting any trust in the Web, which serves no one but itself and loves to make you think you're in control even as it tightens the noose.

That's the normal reason he should consider his actions a mistake. The totally illogical, idiot reason is that Michael doesn't have a hood on its jacket or an umbrella, and is now dripping rainwater on the floor of the station, and Gerry feels bad for it. 

It shakes its head, dislodging what is obviously not anywhere near the bulk of the water. The bulk of the water is weighing down its hair (blond, curly but less so now, Gerry is capable of distinguishing and retaining). Even the water on its skin doesn't come entirely off, shining brighter than it should, reflecting light at odd angles. Its mask is wet.

The mask, at least, Gerry is capable of fixing. He doesn't ask permission before reaching up to unhook the straps from around Michael's ears, since they both know that asking is meaningless. Michael won't be helpful, and Gerry has all the decision-making power, so he might as well save them both the energy of the charade and just do it.

Michael freezes when Gerry's hands come up around its face. Entirely still, the water droplets on its skin and in its hair pausing in the pull of gravity, though light still refracts off them as if they were moving. Gerry tugs the mask loose, and it comes away.

The half of Michael's face that was covered is utterly congruous with the half that wasn't. There's a faint dent of a line across the bridge of its nose and its cheeks that marks where the mask used to be, and this close, Gerry can see pale freckles speckling paler skin. Its cheeks and nose are flushed. Gerry thinks its features, utterly removed from the context of the creature that wears them, could be described as 'cherubic.' 

The scabs do kind of complicate that assessment, though. Its lips are dotted with scabs, more on the lower than the upper, and they don't look like accidental cracks in dry lips. They look bitten.

Gerry realizes that Michael is breathing. Shallowly, and there's something not quite right about the pacing of each inhale and exhale, but it is breathing. And if he can tell that, he's probably way too close. He rocks back on his heels (Michael is _tall_ , and Gerry's not wearing one of his taller pairs of boots) and steps out of its space. He tucks the mask into his pocket. The spider silk thread has stayed in his hand the whole time, despite how little attention he gave holding onto it. Gerry doesn't think he could drop it if he tried.

Michael tilts its head slowly. "Why," it asks, "did you do that?"

"Wet mask seemed uncomfortable," Gerry says. "You can have it back, if you want."

Michael runs its tongue over its lips, stretching them wide enough that one of the scabs cracks and starts leaking a thin, bright trail of blood. "No. I don't," it says.

"Okay," Gerry says. He moves further into the station. Michael does not have a pass, a card, or any other apparent means of interacting with the fare system, but it gets through the turnstile with no problems anyway. "Why'd you have it? The mask." He had assumed it was covering something far more unsettling than scabs. The revelation that the lower half of Michael's face is just as deceptively human as the rest of it (when it's not preventing itself from being perceived in all but the most general of ways or wandering around with horrible knife hands) feels… wrong. It doesn't fit with the energy that Michael gives off, chaotic and tangled and _alien_. Gerry's run into people who have served a power so long and so well they have ceased to be human, but even they still felt like a part of the world. This thing feels like the most foreign monsters, the ones that bubble into the world from somewhere else. But it looks...

It can trick the senses of others. Obviously. But despite the poor match-up, the tension between what it feels like and what it looks like, he doesn't think either is a trick.

He wonders what bindings might be on it besides the obvious spider silk.

"It is… functionally symbolic," Michael says. "Close enough to a muzzle."

"Ah," Gerry says. He doesn't say much else as he navigates through the station and onto the first train. What can he say to that? 'Sorry that Gertrude would do anything to anyone, but particularly to any _thing_ , if she thought it would aid in fighting the work of the Powers'? He's not, first of all. There's enough fanatic devotees to violent, malicious forces that want to destroy humanity, it's not like it's uniquely horrible for her to be a fanatic who's violently protecting humanity from the forces that want to destroy it. And even if he was sorry, what the hell difference would that make? He's not going to stop her. He's certainly not going to let this thing off its chain.

Off the first train, down the platforms, onto the second one, off and back up into the rain, Michael follows him, always close enough that Gerry can feel the pressure its existence exerts on reality, the gravitational hunger of a black hole. Several times he feels as if it's seconds from striking at him, under his guard and far too close, but each time he turns to check it's standing the same distance away. It's rarely even looking at him, attention momentarily captured by a neon advert or a person with a small dog in their bag or a child playing with a bright plastic toy. When it is looking at him, its expression is unreadable. 'Unreadable' isn't 'obvious ravening hunger for human misery,' so Gerry will take it, but it's still weird. He's not used to monsters wearing any expression that's _not_ obvious ravening hunger for human misery.

The pub where Gerry's supposed to meet Salesa is a short walk from the final station, and thanks to his raincoat, Gerry doesn't show up looking like a soggy rat. Michael, however, is dripping on the floor again despite having dried out some during the time on the Underground. No one seems to notice. Gerry doesn't think anyone notices Michael, despite how a laughing group moves smoothly around it. Actually, in part because of that. It's too smooth to be normal, too coordinated, like they're sliding off a glass bubble. People tend to avoid Gerry. Tattoos, piercings, dark clothes, burn scars. But they don't avoid him like that.

Gerry spots a booth in the closest thing there is to a quiet corner and moves in, stealing a menu off a more central and messier empty table. When he slides onto the bench facing the door, Michael is somehow already seated beside him and against the wall, holding a menu of its own and wiggling the laminated paper with a gleeful grin.

Gerry watches carefully, but nothing untoward seems to be happening, so he decides that there's no reason to tell it to stop and looks at his own menu. He already knows he's going to order something to drink, because someone looking like him going to a pub just as people are getting off work and _not_ drinking would probably be at least a little suspect, Michael's weird Eye-averting field notwithstanding. Drinking on an empty stomach is dumb, though, even when you're not sat next to a monster, and he's not going to waste the opportunity to eat a meal that didn't come from a box. Gertrude even gave him money, far more than he needs, and told him to get dinner while he was out. Courtesy of her commitment to wasting the Institute's money in every way possible.

He orders a pint, a burger, and a separate plate of chips, because having had a single protein bar for lunch is catching up to him. Michael orders nothing, seemingly more inclined to play with its menu than use it. Even with the ongoing _fwup-fwup-fwup_ of flapping laminate, no one seems to recognize its existence aside from Gerry. At least it's not bothering other people. He ignores the noise and waits for whatever comes first, Salesa or his food, scrolling idly through his phone. He keeps half his attention on the pub and the other people in it. They all seem normal enough, groups and individuals dropping in for food and drink and (eugh) social time, but plenty of things _seem_ normal right up until they aren't any more. It's unlikely everything in the pub is monsters, but he could have been followed. He could get unlucky. This whole situation could be something entirely different from what Gertrude said it was, and she lied to him to make sure he acted natural and unaware.

The food comes first. The chips, anyway, following close behind the pint and a glass of water that Gerry definitely didn't ask for. Salesa takes longer. Gerry starts eating immediately, because if this is some kind of trap, he's damn well going to get food out of it. Michael apparently gets bored of _fwup_ ing its menu and pulls the glass of water closer before it leans against the wall, directing an unfocused stare at the rest of the pub, and, occasionally, at Gerry. Gerry refuses to let it put him off dinner. He's half through his chips and making progress on his drink when a man comes in and seats himself at the table.

Salesa seems to have come alone, which is… understandable, considering the size of him. He looks like he moves his cargo himself. He looks like he does _everything_ himself. He might, given his notorious lack of trust in others. Word is that Salesa handles all his transactions himself, all his deals, all his inspections. Smart move when you're dealing with hazardous and questionable materials, but given the amount of rich idiots who try to get into collecting, it's notable. Gerry knows Salesa by reputation only, since his mum was only really interested in the books and Salesa doesn't deal in those. There's a lot of reputation to be had.

Still, Gerry doesn't know what he expected, meeting Salesa in person. He definitely didn't expect Salesa to look at him with a weary sort of sympathy.

"You're her latest, then," he says. "Elias must have fully given up on enforcing a dress code."

"I don't work for the Archives," Gerry says.

"Just Gertrude?" he says. The way he says it, it sounds like he thinks that's somehow _worse_ than working for the Archives proper.

"I think if I worked for her, she'd have to be paying me," Gerry says.

Salesa laughs. He looks tired, lines around his eyes from more than age. "See if you can't get a few paychecks out of her before you die," he says. "Might as well enjoy some luxuries before you meet an untimely end." He leans back with a not-quite-careless ease, more like he thinks he can handle anything that comes at him than he thinks he's actually safe. Or maybe he's fine with the idea of getting killed. Gerry wouldn't bare his chest and neck like that, especially not with the current company.

Although. Gerry glances at Michael out of the corner of his eye. It's slightly less there than it was before. He doesn't know if Salesa can see it. No one else seems to see it, but it's possible that they're just intensely not noticing it, which is different. "Thanks for the confidence," Gerry says. "Nice to hear you think I might live long enough to get more than one paycheck."

Salesa smiles. "A toast to your circumstantially long life, then." He inclines an imaginary glass. "What is Gertrude trying to get from me that she hasn't paid for this time?"

"Wouldn't know," Gerry says. She's always got an angle or seven, and there has to be a reason she sent Gerry to this meeting rather than going herself. But he knows she doesn't share information.

Just captive monsters, apparently.

"She's testing a theory," Michael says, and from the way Salesa's face tightens before going carefully smooth again, Gerry's going to guess that he could _not_ see Michael before. "It's not about you."

"Ah. Distortion," Salesa says, inclining his head slightly in what almost looks like a respectful nod. He also shifts slightly, sitting up straighter, bringing his chin down and leaving his neck less exposed. Not totally suicidal, then. 

Michael giggles. "You shouldn't do that. She doesn't like it." It taps a syncopated rhythm on the table with fingers that look a little bit longer. It doesn't leave gouges in the surface or any other kind of damage, but the impacts clack entirely unlike human skin and bone.

"Unless you have her hidden away here too, I don't see that it matters what she does and doesn't like me doing." Salesa raises his eyebrows, as if daring Gertrude to manifest from under the cover of Michael's power. Gerry has a moment where he genuinely wonders if she _is_ there. He saw her leave the coffee shop. But could Michael make him think he saw that? Could she have joined up with them later? Even as she continues not to appear and the likelihood that she's been a hidden observer dwindles, he has trouble shaking the feeling of being watched.

"Being polite will spare you from nothing."

"Makes me feel better, though." Salesa looks at Gerry with a new interest. "She gave you the Distortion's chain?"

Distortion. Gerry feels like he might have heard that somewhere before, but whether it's a title or a type of being or a name or he's just misremembering and conflating reports of the distortion of digital recordings all Powers cause with Distortion-as-a-proper-noun he can't say. "Seems like," he says, examining the rest of the pub for anything out of place. It looks normal, just like it did the last seven or so times.

"Huh," Salesa says. "Interesting." He sighs. "Drinking is out of the question, then. Shame. I had hoped to add more to Gertrude's bill."

"Oh, don't let _me_ stop you," Michael - the Distortion? - says. " _Please_ indulge."

"Not when you're smiling like that," Salesa says. "Not ever, but especially not then."

Gerry eyes his pint and decides that he's done.

The Distortion sighs dramatically and leans over the table, stretching out and propping its face on its hands. It definitely feels more fitting to call it the Distortion than Michael. Not right, not entirely, but whatever it is, it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that's made for names. Which, of course, means it makes sense that a _name_ could be part of whatever bindings are on it. That would likely be why it said Gertrude wouldn't want it called anything other than Michael.

'Where's the harm' is the kind of thought that precedes a fatal mistake. But Gerry doesn't _like_ the idea of using a name as a prison. Personal problem, definitely. His own issues making him twitchy about something that is, in an objective sense, not a big deal. He still doesn't like it.

Any binding that can be undone by Gerry calling the Distortion the Distortion in the questionable privacy of his own thoughts is a binding that wasn't going to hold anyway, right?

The Distortion runs a finger around the rim of its glass to produce a high, thin singing that feels like silent tinnitus. Gerry sees a few other patrons shift uncomfortably, but no one looks over at their table. "Hey," he says to it. The Distortion blinks big, innocent eyes at him and does not stop making the horrible sound. God, it's like having a toddler. "Why are you doing that?" Gerry asks.

"Are you going to command me to stop?" it asks, smile wide and bleeding. There seem to be new punctures in its lips. Gerry didn't see it make them.

That is, however, an answer to his question. "I know you've got a problem with this," Gerry says, gesturing with the hand holding the spider silk, "and I'm not thrilled about it either, but I'd rather you _didn't_ take it out on the people around us."

"Bystanders always suffer most," it says. He knows, he's _certain_ , that it's acting this way to get a rise out of him, to push him into giving an order the way it did when he wanted something to call it. Whether that's part of what the spider silk does on its end, an insistent drive to goad the holder into giving orders, or just the Distortion's reaction to being chained is uncertain, and doesn't really matter that much.

So Gerry decides to give it what it wants.

"Calm down," he says.

The Distortion stills. A jarring, awful prickling in Gerry's teeth that he hadn't been aware of suddenly fades. He feels less agitated, less suspicious. He feels less like the pub is an elaborate setup for something terrible and more like his normal, baseline paranoid self.

Oh. Huh.

Yeah, the Distortion does have some kind of emotional projection power, doesn't it? Gerry felt it being confused at him after Gertrude handed it over. How intentional is that? How much is any of the weirdness around it intentional? It's bound. Bound things are not generally known for their control over their circumstances. Yeah, it's a monster, and you can't ever trust a monster _not_ to have the upper hand… but he doesn't think you can ever really trust _Gertrude_ not to have the upper hand either. If Gertrude weren't justifiably confident in having control of the Distortion, she wouldn't be doing any of this. She's not one of those people who needs reminders of her victories. She doesn't take trophies. She only takes tools.

The Distortion sighs, and its eyelids droop.

Salesa nods. Gerry doesn't want to say it's an approving nod, just because that would feel kind of desperate, but it doesn't seem sarcastic, either. "Appreciated. The Spiral doesn't really enhance anyone's ability to do business."

Spiral?

That tracks. Gerry'd been trying to figure out what the Distortion was, what bigger fear it was a part of, but he couldn't get a solid grip on any ideas to that end. Which, of course, makes sense for _Spiral_ , and he doubts the obfuscation of whatever Web shit it's wrapped up in helped at all with getting his thoughts in order. "Doubt any of them are all that great for business," he says.

Salesa snorts. "You don't know all the markets I do, then."

(Gerry probably does, more than Salesa knows. And he still disagrees. Bargaining with someone who's in the process of being consumed by a Power is _much_ harder than bargaining with someone who just wants whatever they've mistakenly acquired out of their life as fast as possible. It's a matter of priorities, he guesses, and perspective. On both ends of the transaction.)

"I hope you're not _just_ here so Gertrude can test something on you, considering she's supposed to be one of those markets," Salesa continues.

"She told me I was picking something up from you."

"And she gave you money?"

Gerry realizes, all of a sudden, that Gertrude did not. Not enough for an evil antique, anyway. He has a moment where he thinks he misunderstood the purpose of the money she _did_ give him, but even if he hadn't spent any of it, that would be nowhere near enough for even the most harmless mildly supernatural tchotchke. So...

"He could get pickpocketed," the Distortion says. It sounds significantly more at ease. Its voice still has a peculiar loop to it, not quite a doubling as much as an echo of some other recursion, but it sounds less harsh. More lyrical. More playful. 

'Playful' is probably not ideal, but it's a step up from 'murderously contrary.' 

"He's small." The Distortion giggles. "I have the money. What will you give me for it?"

"You're giving me a headache for it," Salesa says. "This was a deal between me and Gertrude."

"Yes," the Distortion says pleasantly. "Now I'm between you and Gertrude."

"That's nice," Salesa says. "Give me the damn money."

Gerry's not getting involved. Maybe he should want to, but there's clearly some kind of history between the Distortion and Salesa, and the more history involved the more likely he is to fuck it up if he touches it. Plus, he's not sure who he should be defending here. Salesa's human, but he's lasted a long, long time as a dealer of evil antiques. He can probably take care of himself. The Distortion's _not_ human, but it's also kind of broken. Gerry really doesn't want to get in the habit of defending it. If he does, and he someday has the impulse to defend it from Gertrude, he may have to off himself for his own safety. Also, if he feels bad for it then it'll have an easier time tricking him into getting eaten, which it will almost certainly try to do.

The Distortion laughs softly. "No?" it says.

Although, it would be easy to just order the Distortion to give Salesa the money. Sooner or later, it's going to have to, and Gerry can make it be sooner. Minimize the chance of… he doesn't actually know what a fight between Salesa and the Distortion would look like, but he doubts it would be great for the other people in the pub. He can end the possibility right now.

Light catches on the spider silk as it twists around his wrist, tying itself in a bracelet that looks like he should be able to snap without even noticing. He's probably never worn anything stronger.

Fuck.

Nope, not doing that.

Salesa sighs. "How about I give your new keeper some advice?" he offers with an auctioneer's reluctance, the voice of a man pretending that something he's willing to give is something extracted at great cost. "Might make things easier for you in the long run. Save you the trouble of trying to be coherent, at least."

"Hmm," the Distortion says. It smiles too widely, showing teeth that belong in a different mouth. "He's doing well so far."

Gerry thinks he's _definitely not_ supposed to feel complimented by that, and the fact that he does just says sad things about his life and the amount of praise he's received. If the Distortion approves of something he's doing, he's probably doing something wrong. If only knowing that made the fizzing warmth of unexpected approval die. He wishes he still had a menu to pretend to look at. Lacking one, he reaches instead for his plate of chips, trying to act as if he has no concern for, attachment to, or awareness of the words being said around him. He doesn't care. He's just a cool guy, a calm guy, and he's going to coolly and calmly shove as much food in his mouth as possible, and no one will be able to ask him to participate in the conversation.

Salesa snorts. "Does he know what he's doing well? And if not, are you going to be the one to explain it to him?"

The Distortion hums. There's a distinctly unhappy edge to the sound. It reaches…

It reaches _into its chest_ , which parts around its hand like a curtain, and withdraws a thick manilla envelope. It hands the envelope to Salesa, who takes it with such ease and composure that you'd think the inside of a chest was a totally normal and not at all unexpected place to store money. It's definitely not the worst thing Gerry's ever seen, and it's not enough to put him off dinner, but it is unsettling. He would also like to know why the Distortion can apparently turn its body into a purse but can't keep itself from getting rained on. Surely being water-repellant isn't harder than doing whatever that was?

"Thank you," Salesa says.

The Distortion grumbles and sinks down in its chair. "You would have gotten the money anyway," it says, and flicks its tongue out, cleaning the drying blood off its lips.

"Yeah," Salesa says. He disappears the envelope under his coat. Hopefully not into a chest-pocket of his own, if only because then Gerry would feel hopelessly behind the times as someone who still used the pockets in his clothes. Then he withdraws a small box and offers it to Gerry. "For Gertrude."

Gerry is reasonably confident in his ability not to get pickpocketed, regardless of what Gertrude apparently thinks. He places the box in one of the interior pockets of his coat. "Thanks, I guess," he says.

Salesa's smile has no humor in it. "You guessed wrong," he says. "So. Your advice." He rests one hand, palm-down, on the table. The other drops out of sight, and Gerry wonders how many artefacts Salesa holds on to for his own personal use and protection. He usually assumes that anyone in with the Powers has _something_ up their sleeve, if not abilities directly granted by a patron then some other supernatural toolkit. Maybe that's a bit of projection, assumption that because he does it others will too, but he hasn't been wrong yet.

Salesa's probably also got a gun. That just seems like common sense. Gerry doesn't feel any more threatened by these things than he does in general, since a constant wariness and expectation of danger means he assumes that anything could threaten his life at any time. It's just… taking stock. Keeping on top of things. As best he can, anyway, considering everything about this situation.

"The Distortion," Salesa says, "is something you're better off not touching, and something you never want to use, and you've fucked both those steps up. It was mad before Gertrude got ahold of it. Now it's worse."

"Did you know it?" Gerry asks, surprising himself. He'd been curious, but he doesn't know when he started to care enough to ask. "Before."

"No," Salesa says. "Knew of it. Knew enough to keep away." He waves a hand at the Distortion where it sits across from him, humming and harmonizing with itself as it traces patterns in the condensation on its glass. "I seem to have fucked that up, too."

Gerry can retain enough visual information on the Distortion to tell that it's drying off, slowly. Its hair is expanding into spirals and coils, curls that revolve around themselves more than they should and waves that are almost too regular, like they're charting something on a graph. It's not dripping any more. And by all appearances, it's either not listening or doesn't mind the way it's being described.

"Someday it's going to get off its leash, and if you're still alive when that happens, it's going to kill you," Salesa continues. "There's nothing you can do about that. Don't use it any more than you have to, don't be cruel, and maybe when it gets loose it'll do you the favor of a quick death." He takes his hand off the table and leans back. "That's my advice."

"Cool," Gerry says. He tries not to sound too sarcastic. "Thanks."

"Sure." Salesa eases out of the booth and stands up. "Don't feel too bad about it. Something gets us all, in the end. If it gets loose and I'm still around, it might come for me, too."

The Distortion gives its soft laugh again, swiping a finger down its glass decisively. "Don't flatter yourself," it says.

"I'll try not to," Salesa says. He nods to Gerry. "Get those paychecks." Then he leaves, moving deftly around the tables and their occupants of varying sobriety.

Just moments after Salesa exits the pub, Gerry's burger arrives with timing so perfect he's _certain_ that the Distortion was keeping them from being interrupted. Without being ordered to. Is it used to Gertrude, anticipating what might be asked and doing it so it doesn't have to suffer an order? Or does it have some other angle here?

What does it _want_ , really?

Pain and suffering and fear and death, like all of them, of course, but it… Gerry doesn't know how to describe the feeling he gets from it. Doesn't want to give the feeling any weight, either. Trust your unexplainable feelings around a creature of the Spiral, that's a great idea. But there's… he doesn't know, an ache? A painfulness to its existence, which is probably yet more projection on his part, the feelings he doesn't want to think about crawling out and displaying themselves on the blank/incomprehensible canvas of the Distortion.

It hasn't moved across the table, something Gerry's sure it could do even though he's the one on the outside edge of the bench. It's still sitting next to him. It's also eating his chips.

"Hey," he says. It looks directly at him with the smugness of a thieving cat and takes another chip off his plate. "If you want chips, get your own."

"I am," it says.

"Fine," Gerry says. There's more chips on the plate with his burger anyway. He pushes the original plate of chips towards the Distortion.

The Distortion takes a chip off of the plate with his burger.

Okay, so Gerry knows one thing that the Distortion wants. It wants to be a _pain in the ass_.

* * *

And that could have been the end of it, if not for literally everything about Gerry's life, the situations he gets involved in, and who he is as a person. Go back to Gertrude, give her her mystery box and her monster, move on. Try not to think too much about it. But the mental rug he's been shoving everything under is getting very lumpy, and he's running out of ways to avoid… anything, really. He's tried a lot of different escape plans throughout his life. They didn't work. The most successful of his escapes was giving the skin book to Gertrude, and he didn't do anything there but accept her offer of help. Gerry's not the kind of guy who can make things work on his own. But he's also not the kind of guy who knows when to quit.

Or the kind of guy who knows how to say 'no,' because the next time Gertrude says she wants him to take the Distortion and do something for her, he says yes. She didn't comment when he returned the Distortion without its mask on, though she did raise her eyebrows slightly, the small gesture communicating a heavy press of judgement. He wasn't sure whether giving him the Distortion again meant she decided that removing the mask was only a minor trespass or if she was just giving him enough rope to hang himself with. Possibly both. Gerry's not the best at reading people, but with Gertrude it's at least as much about her deliberate inscrutability as it is his general ineptitude. And also her schemes-on-schemes-on-schemes. He could guess one of her motives correctly and still not understand her, because she'd have five other motives, some of which operated at odds with the one he had guessed.

Maybe that's good preparation for dealing with the Distortion. Sort of. He doesn't know if it schemes. He doesn't even know if it _thinks_ in a way he'd recognize as such. He tries to err on the side of assuming sapience, but there's familiar consciousness, and there's alien consciousness. The Distortion's pretty damn alien. 

It feels pain, though.

Gerry's reasonably sure of that.

The Distortion makes a hideous gurgling noise, blood that should look something other than human but doesn't dripping from its nose, its mouth, its wrong-mangled arm and the slashes on its torso. Gerry doesn't really get how, when the Distortion's body twists and warps and reshapes itself into impossible and nauseating forms on the regular, the way its arm bends limply is so clearly _different_. It's wrong in the wrong way, which doesn't make sense, which is how the Spiral works, so of course it makes sense in that way, and Gerry's going to stop following that chain of logic before he ties his brain in a knot.

"Fuck," he says.

Gertrude gave him the Distortion so he could take it to kill a Hunter. The Hunter had been killing things, and that made it harder for Gertrude to get a clear idea of the movements and plans of various cults, so she needed it to stop. Gerry hadn't questioned the foundational idea that Gertrude would be more effective at stopping the cults than the Hunter. That went without saying. The idea that _he'd_ be effective at stopping the _Hunter_ he had a few more questions about, but he's killed people taken with/by the Powers before, and he'd done it without the assistance of a knife-handed, reality-warping monster, so it was definitely possible. Not easy. But possible.

Gertrude had given the Distortion about the same orders. To obey Gerry until the end of the mission, not to hurt him unless the alternative was his death, not to leave him unless ordered. Nowhere in there did she tell it to protect him. He didn't tell it to either. He didn't tell it to do _anything_ this time, besides speak if it wanted to. He didn't even take its mask off, because it hadn't been wearing one. Unmuzzled for its job as an attack dog.

So in addition to trying to figure out what he can do about the Distortion being mauled and bloody, Gerry keeps replaying the last few moments in his head, where the Distortion had lunged, fluid and flickering, over Gerry's shoulder to stand between him and the machete that the Hunter was swinging. What followed had been brief and also felt like it took forever, the way fights tended to. Gerry felt like he barely had time to react beyond turning his head as his body took the initiative and made him jump out of the way, but he had plenty of time to watch the Hunter slash open the Distortion's chest as it struck out with long, sharp hands and scored deep wounds into the Hunter's face and shoulders. The Hunter caught one of the Distortion's outstretched arms and jammed the machete through, using it for leverage as they snapped the Distortion's arm.

The Distortion had reacted by wrapping its free hand around the Hunter's torso and _biting_ into the Hunter's bicep. The Hunter twisted the machete in a way that should have made it catch against bone and didn't, and slammed their head into the Distortion's face. But the Distortion didn't let go, even when the Hunter pulled the machete out of its arm and slashed at its chest again. It held on as the Hunter's movements got jerky, as their legs and face began to spasm, as they lost their grip on the machete and it fell to the ground. It held the Hunter up as bloody froth began to bubble at the edges of their mouth. As the spasms became rigidity. Only when the Hunter's eyes rolled back and they gave one last, choking breath did the Distortion drop them.

And now here they all are. One dead body covered in gouges and puncture wounds that correspond to approximately none of the Distortion's currently visible features, a bloody machete, a bloody monster, and Gerry, who didn't even have time to take out one of his knives. Not that it would have done anything, probably, but. Not having done it makes things worse somehow.

The Distortion coughs, and more blood spatters out along the ground.

"Are you okay?" Gerry asks, which is a deeply stupid question, only maybe not, considering the damage some servants of the Powers and some monsters can take. Maybe this is like a paper cut to the Distortion.

The Distortion giggles, then hiccups. It holds its injured right arm stiffly, tucked against its chest without actually touching the two. "Okay. Acknowledged, approved. I hope not. How will Gertrude feel? She does hate a mess." It hiccups again. The hiccup echoes like its laughter does.

"Can you make it back to her?" Gerry asks.

The Distortion turns pale, unfocused eyes on him. "If you command it, I could take us there now. Only if you command, of course, since I must be cut off from my self as much as possible."

Gerry knew he was going to have to reckon with whatever the fuck is happening here, the bigger picture that encompasses the Distortion and Gertrude and their relationship and the spider-silk chains, at some point. That point is getting closer by the second. "Take us to Gertrude," he says. "As safely as you can."

"Spoilsport," the Distortion says with something not unlike fondness, and coughs again. This cough is punctuated with a quiet, animal whimper. Gerry's chest tightens, because his body is a traitor and always has been. He's trying not to care. He's _trying_. A monster is a monster. And a monster that put itself between him and a Hunter's weapon is a monster still, but…

A Hunter is pretty much the only guaranteed way to kill anything the Powers can whip up, so it's not even like that wasn't dangerous for the Distortion. Probably. He thinks. The Distortion works weird. But it sure as hell got sliced up for that choice.

A door opens.

Gerry blinks.

He doesn't know when the door appeared. But it definitely appeared. It hadn't been there before, he's sure of it, if only because the creak of the hinges reminds him in some indefinable way of the Distortion's voice. He can't tell what's beyond the door. Every time he looks through it, he finds himself looking away, certain he saw what was past it and with absolutely no idea what he saw. When his eyes slide away for the… it's been a couple of times, right? How many? When they slide away again, they catch on the Distortion, who is swaying in a decidedly unsteady way.

"Can you walk alright?" he asks.

It giggles in response and lurches through the doorway.

Gerry casts a look at the Hunter's corpse. Still human enough, apparently, that it's not dissolving or collapsing or undergoing any other convenient disappearance. But they're in one of the underground tunnels that run through the city just begging to be occupied by horrific things, so there's a pretty good likelihood that the next thing that finds the corpse will eat it or cannibalize it for parts, not call the police. Gertrude didn't say what she wanted done with the body, and if she wanted him to dispose of it, she should have said so. 

Gerry follows the Distortion through the door.

"There you are," Gertrude says. She's sitting at a kitchen table. Hers, maybe? Gerry's never been to where Gertrude lives. It looks like a place where _someone_ lives, a kitchen in a remarkably average flat. It's just that the door Gerry came through shouldn't have been there, and now isn't, and never was. And the Distortion is there, which would make anything bizarre.

It coughs.

"Don't get blood in my kitchen," Gertrude says, and the blood propelled by its cough vanishes in midair. "I assume it went reasonably well?" she asks, eyeing Gerry over the rims of her reading glasses.

"Uh. Sure," Gerry says.

"Good," Gertrude says. There's a book in front of her, facedown, and a cup of tea still letting off steam. "Take Michael for the rest of the night. I don't want blood on my floors, and leaving him unsupervised in his current state would be a poor decision."

"You can't order him to heal?" Gerry asks. If she can order blood disappeared and he can order the Distortion to calm, ordering healing seems perfectly within the powers of the Web control. But the rules of these things are weird. They always are.

"I can," Gertrude says. "However, in order to sustain healing that rapid, he would need to feed rather more than I usually allow. He'll be hungry regardless, which is part of why he shouldn't be unsupervised."

Ah. Gerry has wondered about the care and keeping of the Distortion. Monsters need to eat, he's pretty sure. Maybe some of them only do it recreationally, but he thinks it's the closest thing they have to biological needs, insofar as the consumption of intangible fear and trauma and misery could be considered biological at all. "I'm guessing you don't want me to feed him."

"What you do in your own time is not my business, Gerard." She twitches one of the strands of spider silk, bending the Distortion's head. "Continue to obey Gerard's commands until he returns to me after you've healed, unless they contradict any standing orders."

The spider silk, still twisted into a bracelet around Gerry's wrist, bunches and twists again, forming a ring around his middle finger. If it was an actual metal bracelet and ring connected by actual chain, maybe, and also not _a tool of the Web connecting him to a monster_ , it would be a pretty cool accessory. As it stands, he doesn't like the fact that it's slowly encasing more of him.

Gertrude has multiple lines. He doesn't know how they attach to her, but she has multiple lines, and she's not turning into a giant spider, so it's probably fine. Right?

"Right," Gerry says. "Do you need anything else?"

"If I do, I'll tell you," Gertrude says. She picks her book back up.

Gerry looks at the Distortion. It's flickering like an old TV, edges disconnecting and breaking into static. He should get it back to his place before it becomes incapable of making doors, if that's something that can happen. "Take us to Pinhole Books, as safely as you can," he says.

A door opens. It's in a different location than the one he came through. He thinks. At least now, having traveled by them once, he feels slightly better about using the impossible doors as a method of transit. Gerry goes through first this time, and has cause to be thankful he did when the Distortion pitches forward just after it follows him in. He catches it on instinct, grimacing as he comes in contact with tacky, drying blood intermixed with fresh, liquid blood. At least he didn't put his hands in any open wounds. Small mercies. The Distortion is cooler to the touch than a human should be, and he doesn't know if that's normal for it or a result of blood loss. In a human, going cold from blood loss is a decidedly bad thing. But he's not sure if the Distortion has any _bones_ , considering how the machete went through its arm, so there's no reason to assume it has a normal human body temperature under any circumstances at all. Gertrude seemed sure it was going to survive. He trusts Gertrude to be a better judge of that than he is.

The Distortion flops over his arms backwards before managing to stand something like upright. It turns its head like it's looking around, but Gerry doesn't think it's seeing much. It seems pretty out of it. More out of it than normal.

"Let's get you… somewhere," Gerry says, trying to think of where he can put a very tall, sharp, bloody supernatural creature. Should he try cleaning the blood off? That seems like as good a place to start as any. He starts walking towards the bathroom, slowly, to give the Distortion time to realize he's moving and keep pace with him. He's still got a hand on the small of its back, but takes the other off its chest, just because the relative size difference means Gerry would have to do a partial, awkward crabwalk if he wanted to steer it down the hall with both hands.

" _Somewhere_ ," the Distortion says with evident distaste. "I suppose I have to be, don't I." It staggers after him. Gerry's glad he doesn't have to try to drag it. He's certain that would go badly.

He gets it into the bathroom and almost puts it right into the shower before realizing it's got shoes on. He had planned to just spray it off. Its clothes are covered in blood, too, it's not like shower water will hurt them worse. And Gerry absolutely does not need to add 'stripping a monster' to the list of bizarre activities he's participated in today. But soaking the shoes does seem a bit excessive. "Can you take your shoes off?" he asks the Distortion. 

It removes them in what would be a perfectly normal human fashion, pressing the heels down with its opposite foot and stepping out, except it leaves its socks behind too.

Fine. Gerry wouldn't want wet socks either. He's not going to question it. After everything he's seen, will he _really_ draw the line there?

The Distortion seems to understand what Gerry wants and steps gingerly into the tub without prompting. He starts the shower for it, and it flinches when the water hits its back. "Sorry," Gerry says, feeling weird about apologizing as soon as the word exits his mouth, though for what reason he doesn't want to examine. He turns the knobs to about the point he usually sets them, then sticks his arm in briefly to check the temperature and wash off the blood the Distortion got on him. There wasn't much, thankfully. He likes this jacket.

As the blood washes off the Distortion, Gerry sees that the slash wounds in its chest seem to be healing. Sort of. They're also emitting a wisping, technicolor smoke. It's not blood, at least, and the gashes seem smaller, so he'll assume that's good. The arm is still bleeding, sluggishly, but as Gerry watches, the flow of blood slows further and eventually stops, giving way to more wispy smoke. There's a rusty pink smear along the wall where the Distortion is leaning, but that'll be easy enough to clean off. Gerry had plenty of experience getting rid of bloodstains. The first step is to make sure you don't care what gets blood on it. Case in point, when he gets a spare towel out of the cabinet, he grabs one already patchy with bleach and hair dye.

When the water starts to run only faintly pink instead of the washed-out red-brown it started as, Gerry turns off the shower. The Distortion looks cleaner, if not any more present in its surroundings than before. Is dissociating in the shower a universal experience? Maybe it's just an experience that can easily take a turn for the Spiral. It seems to come back a little as he awkwardly pats it dry, avoiding the areas that are still leaking smoke.

A combination of the principles of 'act nice to people who have saved your life and could easily end it' and 'return things you borrow in good condition' mean that he is definitely doing the correct actions here, right? He doesn't feel entirely right thinking of the Distortion as a person _or_ a thing, as both categories seem to describe too much the Distortion isn't. 'Monster' is close, but that's not quite it, either. Trying to work out what the Distortion is is like having his depth perception removed and then trying to grab onto a spherical icecube floating in oil with a pair of chopsticks. The tools he has are wrong and the thing he's trying to do is absurd and what he's trying to do it to has no reason to exist the way it does and he's missing a huge perceptual piece of the puzzle.

Something taps the top of his head gently.

Gerry yanks himself out of the whirlpool of weird metaphors and refocuses on the world. The Distortion pets his head again. Its right arm is tucked fully against its chest, hand folded in and under at the wrist like a bird's wing. Its left is extended, hand hovering over Gerry.

"Hey," he says. "What's that for?"

The Distortion tilts its head and does not volunteer an answer. Then it shivers, fluid and jellylike.

Fuck, yeah, a pat-down isn't going to do much to fix it being soaked if it's still wearing wet clothes it can't dry out magically. He offers it the towel, which it accepts and wraps around its shoulders. It shivers again. Smoke continues to rise from the gashes, which now seem less like lacerations in flesh and more like cracks in a cliff face that go much, much further in than they should. Gerry's just going to continue to operate on the assumption that that's a good thing somehow, since he doesn't know what to do if it's not, and move on to figuring out how to fix the shivering, which is something he's more likely to be able to do.

There is no way any clothes Gerry owns are going to fit the Distortion. Unless it does some kind of freaky size-shifting on them, and Gerry would prefer it didn't. So, blankets, maybe? Blankets. He can pull out a space heater, too. It liked being warm, he thinks.

This would be easier if he knew what it _was_.

"I'm gonna get some stuff," he says. "You, uh…" 'Do what you want' would be the worst possible thing he could say to it, so he changes his almost-command to a question. "You need anything?"

"No," it says. The way it's looking at him is like the opposite of when someone looks at him without seeing him — it's seeing him even though it seems to be staring through him at things he can't imagine. It's unnerving, to say the least. Gerry can admit that he's glad of a reason to get out of its sight for a bit.

So when he turns around from getting blankets out of the linen closet and it's _right the fuck behind him_ , that's pretty upsetting. Gerry's first instinct is to freeze, overridden in short order by the instinct to escape. Before he has the chance to actually think, he kicks the Distortion, picking his foot up and slamming it hard into where he guesses its knee is, unable to see to aim through the blankets in his arms. He hasn't taken his boots off yet. They're good kicking boots, sturdy and heavy and steel-toed.

The Distortion doesn't move. Not exactly. But its knee gives, far more than it should, and Gerry's foot sinks in like pushing a hand into putty. The resistance builds slowly enough that there's no real impact, just a gradual stop. Gerry is really, _really_ glad he can't see through the blankets, because he does _not_ want to know what that looks like. Well. He sort of does. But it's an intellectual curiosity, outweighed by a visceral queasiness. The queasiness only gets worse as he realizes what he's done.

But the Distortion doesn't seem angry.

"Oh, lovely. You are capable of defending yourself after all," it says. "Badly, but you try." It relaxes as it says that, like some anxiety it was carrying just dissolved. It continues, "You could have _died_ , are you aware?"

"Is that a threat?" Gerry asks, gingerly attempting to extract his foot. When he begins to lift it, he bends his knee too much, and nearly loses his balance before he sets his foot back down on the floor. The distances weren't right. The way his leg was extended, the amount he bent his knee shouldn't have pulled it that close.

"It functions as one, yes. You wouldn't have recovered from the Hunter the way I can. You are playing in a world of things you cannot imagine, that could crush you without even noticing, with the most minor of protections. Why?"

"Are you asking me why I don't have a patron?" Gerry asks.

"No. Gertrude is your patron," the Distortion says. "She is a _bad_ patron. Worse than the Eye you dabble with."

Gertrude is his patron?

… yeah, he can kind of see that.

"It's a world of bad options," Gerry says. "Do you want these blankets or not?"

The Distortion lets out a hissing breath. "You are small. And fragile. And she will not save you from the other things that would consume you. What sway does she hold, to convince so many to die at her will?"

"I'll put the blankets back," Gerry says. The Distortion reaches out and digs the (not sharp, thankfully) fingers of its left hand into the pile.

"No," it says.

"Fine. Then move."

It steps back, out of his way, and Gerry carries the pile of blankets into what was formerly the study and now serves as a tight, cramped living room. Even with the bulk of the books gone (sold, given to Gertrude, burned), it's not a big room, which is not a problem when it's only Gerry there. The Distortion makes the space smaller in a way that is not wholly supernatural, just by being tall and long and present. Really present, actually. Too present, and it feels _wrong_ , the uncompromising realness of it. Another symptom of the injuries?

Gerry dumps the blankets on the sofa. His priorities when buying this particular bit of furniture had been 'will fit up the stairs' and 'won't carry in some kind of infestation.' As a result, it's small, narrow, more a loveseat than a sofa, but he refuses to use that word on principle. And it's covered in colorful, egregiously geometric patterns. The Distortion will love it. "Here. Make… you can make yourself comfortable." 'Make yourself comfortable' is probably also a bad thing to say to it. Disappearing out to go eat someone would likely make it very comfortable.

"Can I?" the Distortion asks, and giggles. It sounds tired. Like it's laughing out of habit rather than humor. It sits on the rightmost cushion, tucking its legs up underneath itself, and whines very quietly when it bumps its right elbow on the back of the sofa in the process. The smoke wisping from the impossibly deep wounds clashes with basically every other color in the room. Gerry leans against the arm of the sofa on the opposite side from it.

"Dunno. Guess we could find out."

The Distortion moves the blankets one-handed, looping some up over its shoulders and pulling some over its lap. Gerry takes the waterlogged towel away before the Distortion can fully encase itself with an unnecessary source of wet. Not that you can really get hurt by being damp, folk wisdom notwithstanding (can the Distortion even get ill from anything, anyway?), but it's not comfortable, and if Gerry could avoid having to wash _all_ the blankets afterwards to prevent mildew, that would be nice. Throughout the process, the Distortion keeps glancing at him. When the blankets are piled to its apparent satisfaction, it leans over and lies lengthwise along the sofa, left arm folded beneath it and right arm over its chest. It has to keep its legs tucked up to fit at all, and its head is now resting very close to Gerry.

The spider silk glints at its neck, a braided collar with multiple strands branching off. One of them is the one looping around Gerry's hand. The rest trail out and away. He can't quite see the point where they disappear. Each time he tries to follow them, it ends with him realizing he lost track of the strand a while ago and can't recall when. He wonders if any of them ever went to anyone other than Gertrude, if she's loaned out her monster before. How other people treated it. Which he shouldn't care about, and doesn't, aside from thinking that it is very, very easy to be cruel to something under your power.

"What the hell happened to you?" he mutters.

"I was under the impression you were _there_ ," the Distortion says, sounding distinctly unimpressed. "I'm sorry if it failed to adequately capture your interest."

"You're a smartass, you know that?" he says.

"Am I?" it says. "As I am, I am, I _am_. So many things to be, being an I, being forced to choose."

And they're back to incoherence. Fantastic. Gerry sighs, and tries to accept the idea of getting no answers. Like there aren't eyes tattooed on all his joints. Like he's ever been able to understand when to quit. "All of this. The Web thing, and whatever other bindings you've got on you. How did it happen?"

The Distortion glances up at him. "Command me to tell you."

"What? No," Gerry says.

"Command me, Archivist's assistant, Eye-that-is-not. You want your answers neat and organized, filed and tagged and placed in their stack. I — the most I that I am, that I can be, that I have been — _do not work that way_. Unless you command it." Lying on the sofa, injured and wrapped in blankets, their heights reversed because Gerry is still standing, it looks delicate, vulnerable. It looks like it could kill him in a second, if it wanted to. If it was free to. Like a leashed panther, or a cobra swaying to a flute. Contained by measures that seem insufficient and insulting at the same time.

"I…" He wants to know. God, but he wants to know. He hasn't been able to let go of the wanting. How much of it is Eye and how much of it is him he can't be sure, but he knows he can't lay it all at the Eye's doorstep. And the Distortion is telling him to do it.

He wonders, again, if the Web makes it want to be commanded. And if it wants to be commanded because of the Web, if that want is better denied. If a Web-induced desire isn't valid, no matter what the Distortion says. If he should ignore the things it says for the things he's just guessing at, like he knows what's good for it, like he has the right to think he does.

"Tell me how Gertrude bound you," he says, and it's so, so easy.

"I ate one of her assistants," the Distortion says. "When I was vulnerable. When I was becoming. And so instead, I became _him_ , split from what I am, locked into a single thing I am not."

"Bet you regret that," Gerry says, because that's all he really knows how to respond to. He doesn't know enough to address any other part of it, but it feels very important. Somehow. And betraying ignorance of important things, unless you're sure doing so will get you answers, is not a good decision.

"As that's part of why I can now _regret_ , yes. Deeply."

"Can't say I feel bad for you," Gerry says. "Seems like you deserve it."

That's… not totally true. Gerry would be hard-pressed to come up with a situation where someone could _deserve_ to have their will stolen. But the Distortion is not a someone. Right? And Gertrude's assistant can't have been the only person it ever killed. The whole situation's fucked, and the Distortion is far from the only or most blameless victim.

"Do I?" the Distortion asks. "For following my nature?"

"It's Gertrude's nature to be brutal to your lot, so, yeah. If it's your right to eat people, it's her right to take revenge on you for it."

The Distortion gives a slow, satisfied blink, and Gerry, with deep resignation, realizes he has walked right into something. "It wasn't revenge," it says. "She _gave him_ to me."

Ah.

Well.

"Can't say I'm surprised about that, either," Gerry says. It's not a lie. He doesn't know the specific circumstances that would lead to Gertrude feeding an assistant to a thing like this. But he knows that if Gertrude thought it was important, she would sacrifice anyone. Assistants aren't special. Assistants are _convenient_.

"She is a bad patron," the Distortion says.

Back to that. "As far as I see it, _all_ patrons suck. Powers or humans."

"That is… a matter of perspective."

"Well, that's my perspective."

"She puppeted him down my throat," the Distortion says. "I don't think she trusted him to be _capable_ of what she wanted. He wouldn't have fled. He trusted her. But she tied him with this," it wriggles, then raises its left hand from beneath the blankets, spider silk flashing where it bites into the Distortion's wrist, "so all she had to trust was herself. Her orders." It smiles at him. It should be a cruel smile. But it's not. It's a _pitying_ smile. "At least we let you choose. To a degree. But when you serve Gertrude, her decisions are all that matter."

"Gertrude makes better decisions than I would," Gerry says. It's as simple as that, really. He can't leave things up to himself. He doesn't know what he's doing, but he knows how to do it damn well. Anything he does wrong he can do with great effectiveness, to the misfortune of anyone in the blast radius. And once you go down the wrong path, it's almost nothing to keep going.

For example, he's _still having this conversation_ , even though he knows it's dumb. "So, if you're trying to recruit, choosing my own path isn't really a selling point."

The Distortion's pupils dilate. "You don't trust yourself," it says, and it sounds…

Hungry.

Shit.

"Do _not_ feed on me," Gerry snaps.

The Distortion grumbles and retreats into the blankets. He didn't notice it edging closer. He doesn't feel like he's been chewed on, but he doesn't know what that would feel like. "You're no fun," it says.

"Considering what your idea of fun probably is, that's a good thing," Gerry says. "I'm not a fucking candy bar."

"You wouldn't have noticed."

"Not reassuring."

The Distortion huffs and burrows further into the blankets. "She barely feeds me," it says. "I would be more useful if I weren't hungry."

"Useful to _who_?" Gerry asks, and it smiles at him with teeth like a shrill whistle, sharp and piercing. "Yeah, that's what I thought. Gertrude's not going to feed you any more than she has to."

"Those unwilling to handle dead mice shouldn't have snakes," it says.

"People aren't _mice_ ," Gerry says. "And they're sure as hell still alive when you're eating them." He gets, for a moment, a bizarre mental image of thawing a frozen chunk of fear and then offering it to the Distortion with a pair of tongs. The fear is indistinct in his imagination, as he doesn't know how to really represent it, but the rest of the steps are quite vivid. He considered having a snake himself, a few times, and watched enough care tutorials that the process of feeding is easy to recall. In the end, he had decided he wouldn't be able to care for a snake as well as it would deserve.

The Distortion is not a snake. Maybe it's kind of like one? It likes to be warm. If he's understanding what it did to the Hunter correctly, it's venomous. Just in case, he casts back through his memory for snake first-aid tips, but he mainly remembers how to help with a stuck shed (humidity, a warm tub, or a damp cloth), and he kind of already did all those things. So, unhelpful for several reasons.

"They don't have to stay that way," the Distortion says.

"You're making it worse," Gerry says. He should really stop talking to it.

But there's something he still needs to know. _Needs_ to. It's not just a curiosity, it's vital information. At least, he thinks it is. Between the Eye and the Web, not to mention the low-grade Spiral-y confusion he feels around the Distortion, he can't actually be sure. It feels like something he needs to know, at least.

"Tell me why you got between me and the Hunter," he commands.

"The Hunter would have killed you," the Distortion says. "I didn't want that."

"Tell me why."

"You have the power to make this imprisonment… _tolerable_. And you have used it. I want you to do it again."

…

Okay. "What did I do?" Gerry asks.

The Distortion fixes him in its gaze, eyes alive with a different kind of hunger. How does it do that, look so threatening and desperate at the same time? "When you command me, I must obey. Even if it's something I wouldn't choose. Even if it's something I _couldn't_ choose. I cannot make myself tolerate existing this way, but if you order it, I have to. I _want_ you to _make me_."

"Wh—" Gerry remembers the pub. The way the Distortion relaxed. The way the energy changed. How the hate and pain and misery drained, not fully, but noticeably, out of it. "You protected me because I ordered you to calm down _once_?"

"You could do it again," the Distortion says.

Gerry almost wants to laugh. Almost wants to say 'that's fucked up,' or 'that's stupid.' But he imagines what it would be like, to be fully _calm_. The idea of someone else doing that to him is terrifying. He needs his feelings. Even when his actions have been limited, controlled, directed (as they should be, as they have to be), he can keep his feelings. But the idea of being able to do that to someone else…

Something else.

Still.

It would be one of the most certain things he's ever done, at least. He doesn't know what happens to the people he saves. They live with the nightmares and trauma, at best. Sometimes they probably fall back into the maw of the Power that marked them, tagged and tracked for future consumption. If they're lucky, they get eaten and it kills them. If they're not, they get eaten and they get back up again. Burning the books makes him feel better, but he can't get all of them, and he can't be sure they don't respawn somehow. Following Gertrude... He's never quite sure what he's doing for her, what the result will be. She's focused on her work. What that means for everyone else, he doesn't know.

He can do this, though. He knows he can. He's already done it once. He knows something of the consequences. If what he did was good enough that it made a monster risk its life for him, that's _powerful_. Gerry plucks at the thread of spider silk, pulling it between his fingers. Sometimes he fidgets when he thinks, and it's just so conveniently present. It's unthinkably light, barely more than an absence, only easily findable because he knows it's there.

Where does it fall on a moral scale to force _feeling better_ on another being? Even if it said that it wanted it?

Where does it fall to deny it?

"Tell me honestly whether you want me to do that to you," Gerry says.

The Distortion laughs, high and bright, breathless and victorious. "I don't want _any of this_. I don't want to _be here_. Failing that, having to serve, I want _something_ for the misery." As it speaks, he sees flickers beneath its skin, the source of the patterns reflected in the hypnotic swirls of smoke still leaking from it. Alive the way the ocean is alive. Or a volcano. Motion and menace and beauty existing in ways he cannot fathom. What would it be, free? Unbound? How much more exists within it than it's allowed to express?

It's getting harder to argue that he's just projecting on it, which just leaves the awful notion that he's _identifying_ with it. Fuck.

He knew it, he knew this was going to get complicated, he knew he wouldn't be able to keep things simple, but what does it say about him, to be identifying with a monster?

… probably that he has a lifetime of trauma about his identity, his actions, and the things he was expected to do and be. And also that he doesn't know many people, and needs to get out more. It's fine. Even if it means something worse, that he's started slipping away from humanity without noticing, he already knew he had the potential to go bad. It's not news. And Gertrude will put him down if he ever goes too far. He doesn't have to worry about it.

Gerry takes a deep breath.

"Be calm," he says.

The Distortion exhales. Tension drains out of it, and Gerry feels himself relax as the jangling, uncomfortable scratching of the Distortion's emotions softens. A few curls of smoke escape from under the blankets as it settles beneath them.

Gerry gets an idea. Rapidly healing on command will make the Distortion hungrier, maybe even make feeding necessary, and that's not something he's going to let happen, but...

"Don't feel pain from your current injuries," he tells it. 'Don't feel pain' on its own would be a stupid command, since pain is, at the very least, a good way to identify when something is hurting you. But if these injuries are going to heal soon anyway, the Distortion doesn't need to feel them. Gerry would definitely appreciate magic painkillers if he was waiting for something to heal.

It makes a soft sound and gives him a look he refuses to identify, staring up at him through its eyelashes. When he doesn't respond, it shifts its focus and rearranges the blankets, bunching one under its head like a makeshift pillow and straightening out the rest so it's more evenly cocooned.

"Better?" Gerry asks.

"Yes," it says, quiet and exhausted. He thinks it's exhausted. It sounds almost docile, and he can't (doesn't want to) think of a reason for that beyond fatigue.

"Good," Gerry says. He sighs.

He's not cruel. He just doesn't know how to care right. What to do to express it, where to direct it, when he's not supposed to. He wants to err on the side of kindness, but he doesn't know where the line is, and he knows sometimes brutality is the better part of valor. The Distortion is a monster. Anything you do to a monster is justified, because they're a monster.

And if you make a rule like that, then you have a good reason to categorize anything and anyone you don't like as monstrous. Brutality is easy. Brutality is habit-forming.

The Distortion is far from harmless, but it can't hurt him right now, and it's not trying to. It's injured. It's tired. It saved his life, probably. And it's dried out enough that its curls look soft again instead of waterlogged. Impulsively, Gerry reaches out to touch them.

They are soft, even if they don't feel entirely like hair. The Distortion sighs and closes its eyes, which Gerry takes as permission to continue stroking its curls. They move under his touch, and a few of them go so far as to wrap up and around his fingers, flicking at his palm like tiny tongues. It tickles a little, but it's not unpleasant. It's almost, and shouldn't be, sweet.

Gerry tries, very hard, not to feel anything too much like caring for the Distortion, and especially nothing like _affection_.

It doesn't work.

He really needs to get out more.


End file.
